 Hello and welcome to this session, Going First, The Edge Project in Small Libraries. I'm Brenda Haug and I'll be facilitating this session in which we'll be featuring two special guests, both from Oklahoma. Mary Haney is Director of the Hennessey Public Library and Leanne Barnes is Director of the Okine Library. Before we dive into the content, let me quickly tell you about the technology we're using today. So audio will play through your computer speakers or your headphones, and if that's not working or this quality isn't good, you can use a phone for audio instead and we'll put that phone number in the chat for you. And I'm going to put up a message that says, can you hear us now? So hopefully anyone who's not hearing us and who is having sound issues can let us know that in chat. We'll use chat throughout the session today and you can use it to ask questions, share experiences, let us know about tech difficulties. You can see it on the left-hand side and just type in a message and send that and we will respond. Feel free to ask questions throughout or if you have any web resources or different things that you think of throughout the session, feel free to share them there. We will be collecting all of that and we'll send you a follow-up email message. Everyone who's here today, everyone who registered will get a follow-up email message. And in that message, there will be a link to the session recording. This is being recorded. There will be a link to the PowerPoint slides that we used today. And then again, any websites that are discussed or shared during the session will include those in that follow-up message today too. So that's an email that you'll get later today. If this is information that you feel would be useful for someone else who you know wasn't able to attend today, feel free to share all of that with them too. So today's session is brought to you by several groups. I work with TechSoup for Libraries which is part of TechSoup. TechSoup is an organization that helps nonprofits and libraries use technology to serve their communities. It's one of the organizations that's part of a coalition called the EDGE Initiative. And that's what today's session is about. Funded by the Gates Foundation and being led by the Urban Libraries Council, the EDGE Coalition has been developing benchmarks. These are best practices to help public libraries assess where they're at with public technology services and then also make plans for improving. And the website for the EDGE Initiative is www.libraryedge.org. We'll include that in the follow-up message. And I also included it in the session information, the registration information for today, and encouraged people to take a look at the site and think about questions to ask us during the session. So again, the benchmarks, there are 11 benchmarks in three categories. And you can see as you look at these categories that the benchmarks aren't just things like number of computers a library has or amount of bandwidth a library has. Those things are in there but they are much broader. And these benchmarks are the basis of the EDGE assessment tool. Pilot libraries have been testing the benchmarks in the assessment. And there are now seven states that are soft launch states. And they're listed there. And there are about 150 libraries in those seven states that have taken the assessment. And in January of 2014, the online assessment tool is going to be available to public libraries nationally. So that online tool right now just available to the pilot libraries, but in January of 2014 this goes national and will be available to everyone. Again, it's an online assessment tool that the pilot libraries have been using. There is a PDF version, so a document version of the assessment workbook. And we'll share the link to that in the follow-up message and then also in the chat too. So that online assessment tool available January 2014, but right now there's a workbook version that you can take a look at and we'll share the link to that. It's going to be very similar to the online tool that you'll have access to in January 2014. So I'd like to find out. Again, we've offered a few webinars now featuring libraries around the country, pilot libraries. Today's session is specifically focused on this initiative in smaller rural libraries. So I'd like to pull the audience to find out what size libraries you're with. I've got an actual pull that's part of our ReadyTalk tool. So if you can weigh in on this, what size population does your library serve? I'll give everyone a few minutes to respond to that. I'll hear that term small library or rural library used to refer to different sizes. So this will give us a feel for where everyone is at who's here today. It's not applicable if you work with a state library or a regional system or something, some sort of support organization. That's for you. Okay, I'll give you just a few more seconds to weigh in on that, and then I'll take a look at the results with you. Okay, so it looks like we have a lot of you here who are in smaller under 5,000, and then 11.5% in that 5 to 10,000, 8% in the 10 to 25, and then 26.4 and over 25. And then a lot of you who aren't, maybe you might be, for example, someone said they're from the New Mexico State Library. And I'm guessing we have a lot of people online who are in roles like that, work with many different libraries in different ways. Okay, great. Well, that's helpful. Thank you. Okay, so again, there have been pilot libraries testing this for quite some time, and that's who we're going to be talking to today, is directors from a couple of the pilot libraries. Mary Haney and Leanne Barnes are both directors of Edge Pilot Libraries. Mary is director of the Hennessy Public Library in Oklahoma. Welcome, Mary. Thank you. And Leanne is the director of the Okene Public Library, also in Oklahoma. So welcome, Leanne. Thank you. So the structure for today is this. Mary and Leanne will each talk about their library and community, and then they'll talk about their participation in the Edge Assessment, what was involved with that. They'll talk about the results of the assessment, plans for involving stakeholders, other plans they're making because of the assessment results, and then we're going to wrap up the session by having each of them share advice with others, others who are just getting started with or who maybe are deciding whether or not they're going to get involved with the Edge Initiative and the assessment. We'll go back and forth between speakers with each of the topics, but to keep that from being confusing, we'll have the name of the library on each of the slides. With that, let's go ahead and dive in. We're going to start by hearing from each of these library directors about their library and their community. So Mary, we'll start with you if you want to tell us a little bit about Hennessey and the library. Hennessey is a very, very small library. When you look at the libraries that are 5,000 and under, we're right about in the middle of that. Our population served is 2,156. That's actual town population. We are a library that serves the entire county as most Oklahoma libraries do, but primarily our patrons come from those demographics. We have 1,680 active card holders. Many of those cards are family cards. So you see that we're serving a large percentage of our population, even though we're a very, very small library. I think you'll discover that Okene has an even smaller budget than we do. Our budget, total budget, this is our salaries, this is utilities on the building, this is everything, and that's $110,000, $235, $110,235. Out of that, I only have $1,000 that I use for books and materials and technology and all other kinds of things. Some are reading that sort of thing. All of that, my budget is only $1,000. So you see we really, really, really depend on community support, donations, those kinds of things, and don't have a lot of financial resources. We have three full-time employees. This is unusual for a library our size, but the town is very, very committed to the library. So we are actually each of us full-time employees, but there are only three of us, and we do everything. We clean the bathrooms, we take care of the trash, we take care of the garden, and we do some library business along the Mose Lines too. That's exciting that you have a garden. That's new. Well one of the things Mary that you mentioned when we were preparing for this is that active card holders that you've seen a significant increase in that, right? You used to be a much… Yes, we really have. I've been here 16 years. And when we first began the project here at the library, we had 300 card holders, and those were individual card holders. But as we've added computers and as we've added other services for the community, we have added card holders to go along with that. The community has become very, very excited about our electronic resources, and that's not just the Internet. That's things like faxing, and copying, and scanning, and all of those kinds of things. It has really, really increased the number of people who come and use the libraries. So we've seen quite an increase there. That's great. Okay, so that gives us kind of a feel for Hennessey and where you're coming from. Let's talk to Leanne about Okine. Leanne, you want to tell us about Okine in the library? All right. We are located about 25 miles west of Mary's library in Hennessey. And as you can see, we have a much smaller population. The joke is that between Mary and I, there's the river and farmland, and that's it. There's no stoplights, no nothing. We have about a population of 1,200. We have about 900 active card holders. I've kind of estimated that because originally when I started here, they were doing family cards. And when I updated all of the systems, we went to individual cards. And so we've had to kind of go through and call out some. Our budget is about $36,000 a year. We're only open 17 hours a week. In the summertime, we're open 21 hours a week to accommodate the heat and our summer reading program. Now that budget doesn't reflect our utility, so that may be a little bit of a skew for some people. We have two full-time employees, and like Mary, we do everything from desk to put out toilet paper. And we have one part-time employee that I just employed this past year. And she is a teen from the school, and she comes in after school, and that's made a huge difference in the different people coming in, that they see that we're here, and that, oh my gosh, we're welcome. Yes, of course you are. So we're a little bit different. I did create a slide that kind of gives you, we're basically a Caucasian community. We have a few African Americans, Native Americans. We have a much higher percentage of Hispanics than we do Native Americans, even though one of the towns just 20 miles from us, most of their population is Native American. Okay, one question that we got that I'll ask. Funding, how are Oklahoma Libraries, your budget, does that come from local or from the state? Where does the funding come from? My $36,000 comes from the city of Oakland. And that doesn't include state aid, which for me was a little over $3,000 last year. Everything else is donations. I have a variety of sources actually. The budget line that we looked at on the slide is from the town budget, and that's the town commitment. Kingfisher County, however, has a special sales tax that is dedicated to the volunteer fire departments and other areas, the libraries. There are two libraries in Kingfisher, and we share a very, very small portion of that sales tax. And of the two libraries, I share the smallest portion. But it does give us a little extra funding. We also do the state aid. We make just less than $5,000 on the state aid. And we have a lot of donations. We just have many monetary donations that come in. So we are very close in our operating budget to matching the operating budget. This is without salaries, without utilities, and so forth. We match and exceed through donations and the Kingfisher special tax, what we receive from our town budget. Okay, good. Thank you. Okay, well again, keep asking questions in the chat, and we'll keep answering those as we go. Let's talk here about your participation in EDGE. What was involved with being part of this and being one of the pilot libraries? Let's go ahead and start with you on this one, Leanne. Can you talk about what you did and what it involved? I did it. I did the assessment. And as I said, I did it first on paper. That way I could read it out loud when there were times when it was just the other full-time employee and I were here. We actually read them out loud and said, okay, can we do this? Do we understand what they're asking? And we spent about three days doing that off and on, talking it out, going back, looking at them, discussing the questions, that kind of thing. And then we put it on Survey Online. To put it online once we've done it on paper did not take any time at all and was very obvious. We stayed with our original answer that we came up with. Then that's the thing you need to be. You need to be honest and realistic as to what you can do where you're located. And we had to always take into consideration base and staff and budget. There are two different, two or three different nos on the assessment. And that's where you have to be honest. No, I'm not going to do this. No, I'd like to do this or no. And so that you can see, yes, what fits best with my situation. Okay, and Mary, I'll ask you the same question. Can you talk about how you went about completing the assessment? What was involved? I also completed the assessment and I need to give this caveat. When this was rolled out, it was during the summer reading program. And so this was really done just almost by the seat of the pants in the little corners of time that we had in the summertime. And so I wasn't as organized as Lee Ann by any means. This I basically sat down at the computer and went through it and just did it. I was put off by the very first question because I couldn't answer it. And I thought this is going to be a disaster. But when I got the input that I needed from my Internet provider for that first question, then from there on, everything that was there is the sort of thing that a director and most staff members would know and would understand. It was very, very simple. It probably took about two hours. I'm not sure exactly how long it took, but it didn't take altogether a great deal of time. It was very, very simple, very easy to complete. I was very pleased with how easy it was to go through the assessment. Okay, good. And there's a link, although I'm hearing that maybe the link isn't working. So we'll test that and see if we need to change that. But we will send that in the follow-up. So again, this is an online assessment. There's a PDF version, and we're going to send that out so you can take a look at it. And what we're hearing is that some people like to print it out even if they have access to the online and do it the paper way first and then input that. Question that came in that I didn't have a chance to ask you when we were asking about your libraries, how many hours are you each open? How many hours per week is your library open? Tennessee is open five days a week during the week from 9 to 6. We don't take a lunch hour. And then we're open on Saturday from 10 to 1. We do close for holidays, and we close on the Saturdays before a holiday on Monday. We're open Monday through Friday, no weekends unless we're doing a special program. We're open 17 hours a week in the summertime, which is June, July, and August. We're open 21 hours a week to accommodate our summer reading program, and unfortunately in Oklahoma the past two summers have been excruciatingly hot. We're trying to get our people a time when they can come in, and we're available for them before they have to get out of the heat. Okay, so we've talked about the assessment or participating, what that looked like. So let's hear about your results. What did the assessment have to say? Let's start with you on this one, Mary. What did your results show? Well, the strengths that we had, it showed that we provide individualized assistance, and of course we knew that, and training to increase our digital literacy. We provide access to relevant digital content to our people. We do that through both the website and through Facebook. We enable our patrons to create their own digital content, and by enable that means in many cases we sit down with them at the computer, teach them how to use the various software programs that they need to do that, and to create their content. Our decisions are definitely based on community priorities. We don't have enough money to really get out into areas where we aren't sure that there is a need, and so we are very, very much based on community need. Areas for improvement, oh my goodness, if you're a small library, when you take this assessment, don't let this discourage you. There are so many areas that a small library is never going to be able to function in, but there are areas, even in those places where it seems that only a large metropolitan library could function, there are areas there where you can see how in your smaller, smaller milieu that you yourself can find improvement, and the areas that I have targeted for us is to improve our use of online resources. I'd like to see a little more involvement on community boards. We're a very small community. The same people do everything on every board, and we know everyone, so becoming involved, a little more involved than we are now can only be beneficial to us. The big area for us is handicapped accessibility. I at one time had a completely handicapped accessible machine, but because of financial difficulties, we no longer have that. I want to reinstate that. We need better network security. We need digital training opportunities for our patrons. We're doing one-on-one now. We'd really like to be able to offer some classes. We aren't sure how we would do that. And very definitely, because everything is changing day after day, we want more technical training for staff, and that includes for the director as well as for everyone else out there trying to keep up with the new things that are coming down the pike. Okay, and then, Okine, what did your results look like, Leanne? We were strong in the community value in the area providing access to digital content. And a few other things which pleased us a great deal. Our areas of improvement, building better and new relationships with community partners and the staff, we're needing technology expertise. We have some, but we are in desperate need of more, and having sufficient devices and bandwidth was a real problem for us. Okay, good. We're getting some more questions. How many public computers do you have? How many public internet computers do you have? Let's start with you, Leanne. How many do you have? I have three public access computers and two off computers, which are literacy stations for the children. Okay. How about you, Mary? How many public computers, internet computers at Hennessey? We have two desktop computers, and then we have four laptop computers that are in operation, and then we have two held back for labs. Okay. And do you have Wi-Fi? And if so, is it available after the library is closed too? Can people pull up in your parking lot and use Wi-Fi? Start with Mary. Yes, we do. We are 24-7. In fact, we just went over to Broadband last week and had some problems with our Wi-Fi. And the results were that we had a lot of feedback from college students, from oil field workers, from various people who accessed that Wi-Fi at two and three o'clock in the morning. So that's been very important for us, and we do provide that. Okay. How about you, Leanne? Do you have Wi-Fi, and is it available all the time? Yes, we also have Wi-Fi, and it's operational 24-7. And she's right. I can sit out here and I can sit at my desk and see people pull up in front of the library and use it, and then drive off and wave at me. So yes, we're getting a lot of views from that too. Do you measure that in any way? Do you have a count of how many times you... I don't. No, I would love to. I would love to also, but we just don't have a way... I guess a camera out there would be something, but we don't really have a way of monitoring that. Okay. So just to kind of go through this process. So you took the assessment, and you got a report from that and a score, and that report showed you areas where you were strong and areas for improvement. And then also there are resources. So like in areas for improvement, there are resources that you get as part of the report and also an opportunity to take courses. Is that right? Maybe I'll throw that at Leanne first. Yes, yes you do. And I've taken a couple of them, and they've been very good. I had a little trouble connecting on one of them, but they have been very good. Another thing I've found is when you're working up your plan of what you're going to be able to do, they have resources, articles that you can click on, exact things that other people have done, and they've been very helpful. So there are four courses. And again, right now it's just these pilot libraries who are taking these courses. But so let's say you take the assessment and your results show, or because of your results you want to focus on improving your advocacy or your community assessment and planning. There are four different courses, advocacy, community assessment, tech management, and then also leadership as it relates to technology and the library too. So those courses are available. How about you Mary, have you looked at the resources or taken the courses? Yes, actually since we talked last time I've worked more on the action plan and have looked at several of the resources. I've taken one of the classes. I've set it up so that each of my staff members can take a class. And we're gathering together the participant guides and putting them in a book so that we can all share with one another the results that we've had. The resources are absolutely fantastic. One of the areas that I was concerned about was staff competencies. And I found several of the resources there that gave us checklists for the kinds of things that you would expect from staff at different levels. And a checklist for me is perfect because it's quick, it's very simple, it's something I can look at and say okay, we're good here, we're bad here. This tells me what I need to do. So very impressed with the resources. Enjoyed the class immensely and learned a great deal from the class. Good. One thing that you mentioned Mary said, oh my goodness if you're a small library you can feel overwhelmed by this and by not being able to complete all the things. One of the things is a score. You get a score as you do this. And right now this isn't available, but once peer comparisons based, grouped on service area populations, those are going to be available in spring of 2014. Once enough people have done this assessment so there's a statistically significant number of libraries, then you'll be able to see a comparison to peer libraries, peer sized, peer population served libraries. So I think that will be, I think both Leanne and Mary expressed that that was something that they would find helpful. Yes. That's going to be so very important because Leanne and I both are like so many of the librarians in Oklahoma. You really push and you measure yourself against benchmarks and you try and make sure that you're doing the very best you can and when you take an assessment where your benchmarks are set by the largest libraries it can be very depressing to see that low score. But when you compare with another library of your own size and demographics it gives you a little better concept of what you can expect out of yourself. It's really hard for a type A person. Another thing about those peer comparisons, your results will be, you'll have access to them but nobody else will see them. So you'll just see comparisons to similar sized libraries. So nobody else has access to your results even when that comparison is possible. That will be very good. Okay, well let's take a couple more of the questions that have come in. Questions about other kinds of grants. Have you, either of you received Gates grants or have you been part of any federal BTOP projects? Does that sound familiar, BTOP or Gates grants? We did not do the BTOP quite bluntly because I didn't know how I would sustain it after it was completed. I didn't have the resources or the money. They did a Gates grant before I came and that's the only one that I know of. We've done two of the Gates grants. We did the original Gates grant and then we did the upgrade. In actuality the very first computers that we received through the Gates grants have just recently been retired. Those were such reliable computers. We really enjoyed that and no, we didn't do the BTOP project either. Okay, we just retired our last Gates computer tools this past year. So they were really good. Good. Okay, and this one is for you Mary, so I pulled your slide back up. One of your strengths was enabling patrons to create their own digital content. What kind of digital content are you seeing people create? We have several students who come in and they're doing PowerPoint presentations. We have people who are taking information, particularly photos and images from the computer and manipulating them in various ways and using them in either files or for printout and for copies. So there's a lot of that kind of thing. We're trying to show them how to manipulate the photos themselves. A lot of work being done with photos, but we also have people who are business people coming in creating menus for their businesses and this sort of thing and trying to show them how to set those menus up, how to use Word, how to use the various software programs that will assist them in that manner. Resume, we just talked yesterday about needing to create our own in-house template for resumes that is not quite as general as what you find out on the web, something very specific to what our people need. Those are just some examples of what we're doing. Okay, good. Another question is your state library in Oklahoma, both of you are in Oklahoma. Has the state library provided support or encouragement as you've gone through this process? Oh yes, a great deal. What type of support have you from them? ODL, Oklahoma Department of Libraries, provides coursework for us that is free of charge. In some cases we actually receive, depending on how far we come, we receive stipends for travel. And that has just been just phenomenal for us. We also have consultants who will come out, actually will come to the library if you have a problem that you just simply cannot solve by yourself and they will come and they will assist in that way. So there's been a lot of assistance there. And of course financially we look at that state aid which is so important to us. Okay, well you've talked about the assessment that you did and talked about the results. Let's talk about next steps or what it is that you are doing or are going to do with this. And we'll start with Leanne on this one. You want to talk about actions either that you've done or that you're planning to do? I was in the midst of doing job descriptions because they didn't exist here. And so when I after I did this I realized just saying they need to be computer literate was not adequate enough. So I'm revising job descriptions to include specific goals that we hope to achieve. I've been talking with another library with Tonga which is just south of this 25 miles about doing not only a community assessment which I want to do for our community but maybe even a county-wide community. I've got to plan ahead for future technology upgrades. One of our computers is starting to age on us greatly. I'm sharing the results with our City Council and our library board. The City Council is very interested if you plan far enough ahead because it gives them an option, an opportunity to say, okay, money is going to have to be spent. Sometimes they need a little convincing and they need to think it's their idea so that you can move forward. We're going to use the results for advocacy and I kind of like to say call that publicity also. We seem to forget that little point. And planning, our library board is very much into having long-range goals also. And so those are what we're working on at this point in time. Okay, one question that we got that I'll insert at this time because it's relevant is about your City Council. Can you see involving them at the assessment phase? As you were going through the assessment, do you think it would be useful to involve city leaders at that point? I talked to a few of them and I make a presentation at every City Council meeting anyway. And to say would you like to sit in with me and go through this and answer some of these questions, they said no, we really want you to make that decision and come back and tell us what you feel is best. And so they're kind of depending on me which kind of makes me a little nervous. Okay, well let's hear from Mary a same question. What are your plans, are your next steps, or actions you've taken already maybe too? One of the major things that I want to do is add some new resources to our website. And there are some wonderful resources that are listed to help with this. We have so many people who are seeking jobs. It's not really because of an unemployment issue in our particular region at this point. We're in an oil boom. And so we have people moving from one job to another rather rapidly opening new jobs. So we have new jobs opening, people moving into those. We're seeing a lot of applicants here doing job seeking. And I want to add some resources there to our website. Small business development is another area that I think would be very useful for our people to have on the website, to have those resources available to them. Career testing, that's in relationship to the job seeking. Early literacy, we are really, really working with our young here on our literacy. Our poverty rate amongst the young, check that demographic. Our poverty rate is very, very low. We're at 16.4 below the poverty rate and 23% of that's children. And of course those children aren't receiving the same kind of resources that the children of middle class and upper middle class families are. So early literacy is a very important thing. And to have that accessible on our computers, you need to understand they don't have computers in their home, but they are here. And to have that accessible on our website, that I think would be very valuable to them. We want to share our resources. We'll do that to the library community. The board is very supportive. The friends of the library as we begin to move through this and determine our actions, we'll share with the town council. The town council as Leigh-Anne's town council is very uninterested in being a part of the EDGE initiative. And that comes from being a very small rural community. These fellows are citizens in the community who really don't have either interest or expertise in some of the areas that they are overseeing. And they rely very, very heavily on the people they put into those positions. So the police chief, the library director, the public works director, those people in a small town have much more authority than they would in a larger town and much less oversight by the town council. So it's not that they are not concerned. It's just that they don't feel that they have the background really to work in those areas. Resources sharing, we'll share through our website, through Facebook, through the newspaper, the usual resources that we do. And the results, we're already looking at our results in our planning. The tech plan is going to be revised. There was some interesting information that I received in the class yesterday about the tech plan that we will integrate. And we can use these results for advocacy. There are some wonderful templates for slides that can be presented like at the Lions Club and various clubs to introduce the EDGE initiative and what we're doing and very valuable to us. So these are the plans we have for our coming actions. Okay, well let's move on to advice. You know that you have lots of people who are interested in the smaller library perspective on this. What advice do you have for anyone who hasn't done the assessment yet or who is thinking about whether or not they want to get involved with this? And we'll start with you on this one, Mary. I think you've heard this both from Leanne and from me. You just can't do it all. When you're a small library and you don't have enough people and you have to do everything, you cannot do everything that is on the EDGE assessment. You simply cannot. So you have to set your priorities and you have to determine what is right for your community and for your library. And that's the very first thing, most important thing I think for this entire initiative is to use this as a tool for yourself. Leanne pointed this out. Be realistic. If you're never going to do something and you know you're never going to do it, say I'm never going to do it, but look at how you can possibly do something similar in a way that fits your community. And definitely participate in the training sessions. If nothing else over on that chat side, the sharing is absolutely invaluable. You will get perspectives from people who are very different from other regions, but all of us have the same kinds of problems. So do participate in the training sessions. They're wonderful. They're well organized and you'll learn. Create your own action plan. EDGE makes it easy. As you're going down through the recommendations, you can just simply click on it and say add it to my action plan and it will do that. And then of course you can revise your plan and make it fit yourself. And last thing, take your time. Do it right. There's nobody looking over your shoulder. There's no grant that's writing on this. There's no rules or regulations here. This is a tool that we can use to make our lives better in the library and to reach our communities in a better way. Wonderful training tool, learning tool. So take your time and do this in the way it should be done. As you went through and did the action plan and had to make choices about what to include, or as you've been setting priorities, was that hard to do? Was it hard to pick and choose? What made sense for your community? No, not really. It might be harder for a large library in actuality. But for us, it's very obvious to us the kinds of things that we simply cannot do. And the kinds of things that aren't needed in the community, when the community is this small and you know the players and you meet the players on a day-to-day basis, you know what your needs are. You know exactly what your needs are. And it makes it much, much simpler. Good. Thanks, Mary. And Leanne, how about advice from you? Some of the same things that Mary had said, you might want to start small. Pick a single benchmark or a subcategory to start with. I was on a training thing and someone said, pick the low-hanging fruit. Yes, pick one that you're going to be successful at, that you know that you can do and do it. And like I said, make sure everybody knows that you're successful. And then if something doesn't work, try another one. Don't give up. This is an opportunity for us to look, step back, and look at our library from a different perspective. I get very tunnel vision. I'm working on a project to expand our library which is consuming my every waking moment. And I needed to stop and say, okay, what am I doing now that's good? And what am I doing that I thought was doing good? Which is one of the things we're working on in a small town. Like Mary says, you see everybody everywhere. So you assume you're meeting their needs and that they've expressed an opinion. Well, that's not true. You don't get to see everybody. And there is a certain group population, a sector of my population I do want to meet. And that's the reason I was so interested in doing this, especially for the assessment part. I feel like we need to contact as many people as possible with this. And this isn't life or death. And I know I said don't compare yourself to other libraries unless you're comparing yourself to a library that is your size. Mary's much larger than only 25 miles away. I've got that all around me. But we're servicing the people here in our area, and we're pleased with that. And so don't get discouraged if you think, oh, I can't do this. But you really can do something. And one thing will lead to another. Okay, this might be a good time to start asking some of the questions that have been coming in. One of them that kind of sounds like this is something you're on your radar to Leanne, but someone is asking if they're planning a building remodel or an addition, can this help with planning for use of computers, how to tailor the space, and make it. It did. Some things I hadn't even thought about. I knew we needed to be ADA accessible once we start a renovation, and we needed a bathroom that was ADA accessible. But the computers and having one that Wheelchair can easily roll up to sound, privacy became something I hadn't considered because we are going to put our computers in a specific location, and how can I help the patrons with that. There's several of the things, and this may sound crazy, but how many electrical plugins do you have? That's something you've got to consider. If you're going to have a bank of computers, and a bank of computers in my world is two, at times, where are you going to put them? And is your electrical wiring sufficient for that? If you're talking remodeling or expanding, yes, there's several things in here that will give you ideas that possibly you hadn't thought of. Good. Let's see, other questions. Who does the IT for each of your libraries? Mary, who handles IT duties at your library? Everything that gets done has to be done by the director or staff. So if it's a question that I can solve, if it's a problem that I can solve, then I solve it. If I can't solve it, then I have to go to Enid, which is 20 miles down the road, and hire a tech person to come in. I don't have the money to hire a tech person, and so I get on, I Google the questions, I read the different websites and the blogs, and learn everything I can. Short answer I think for both of us is we're IT all the way around. That's pretty close to accurate. The girl that works with me here, she refers to herself as a Dosteva, and I'm totally lost when she starts talking a few things. I don't know. I'm like Mary, I work with it and play with it. I do have a local guy here, but he's very, very busy. I've met him here at 6 o'clock at night after we've closed so that we can try something. And I have to brag on him, bless his heart. He usually does not charge. He'll charge if he has to buy parts or something for us. He charges us for that, but he donates his labor to the library. So I'm very thankful for him. Okay. We do have a number of people here who are from state libraries or regional library systems. From a perspective, as being in a pilot state, what's your advice on state library involvement? Is it beneficial to have the state library involved in the assessment process? How can the state library best support the libraries who are doing the assessment? Let's start with you, Mary. What are your thoughts on how other states, how they can support their libraries as they take the assessment? What would be your recommendation? I like the way ODL approached this. Basically, the assessment was ours to do with no input, very, very minimal input from them. But they were the people who said scat. They were the people who sent us the reminders. They sent us sometimes emails on the very last day before we could do something and say, are you going to do this just to keep us on point? But it was a very good thing, I think, for us that they didn't really involve themselves in the actual assessment process because that took some pressure off as we were going through it. And I think it helped us be maybe more honest than we might have been in other respects. So I think they did some very, very good things in doing that. One of the things they could have done differently, but I don't know that they could have done it differently, but one of the things that I wish had been done differently, this was rolled out during the summer, during summer reading. And our library year, the rhythm of our library year is that right about the end of May, and for us it is May because we have school visits in May, from May through about October at the Hennessy Public Library. That is the busiest time of our year. We meet ourselves coming and going, and for this to come out at that particular time, and for us to be going through these courses and making these planning decisions, that has been very, very difficult for us, not because the EDGE initiative process was difficult, but because the timing was very, very difficult. So if there is any control over the timing, try and fit that into the proper time in your library year, into the rhythm of your library year. Good. Anything to add to that, Leigh Ann? I thought they were very helpful in the fact that they weren't, you must do this, you must do this. They asked, did you want to do this? And I was kind of hesitant, and they said, really you ought to. And I was glad that I did after I did it. They did not offer advice so much as, like Mary said, you've got a deadline coming, trying to keep us all our little ducks in a row here. And they were very good about that. One of them made a comment that they were interested to see what we had said after it was all said and done, to see if there is something that they could do to help, especially on some of the answers we gave. As in, no, but I'd like to do this in a year, or no, I have no way of doing this at all. And seeing, well maybe if they helped in those areas, that that would relieve us of some of the tensions that we're working with. Okay, other questions, and again, go ahead and keep asking me. I'm getting some questions from state libraries that I'm not able to answer. There's about access to the systems and access to the results for the libraries. I'm going to put an address in chat that I think would be a good place to send those questions. I'm just not sure, but we should send those to Edge and Ask. So some state libraries wondering about access to Edge before the rollout and InfoN getting involved. So several questions from different states about at the state level how to get involved. Okay, another question, this one's for you, Mary, just referring to your funding for books and materials, a fairly low dollar amount there. How do you, with so little money available for that, how do you provide new materials to your patrons? It has to be very, very targeted. I have to meet absolute need. I don't have the luxury of trying a new author or trying a new subject with my people. I have to absolutely meet their need. How do I know what their need is? Well, we're a very small town and they tell me. They come in and they say, do you have this author? No, I don't. But if I look at that author and I think, you know, I have five people, ten people, twenty people who might read that author. If I had that author in the library, then I buy that author. And if that author's first book generates interest, then I buy, say it's a series author, I'll buy that series. So very, very targeted purchasing to begin with. We try to work very closely with the school. When they do their summer advanced reading, then they have certain books that they have to read. And of course there's no access to the school library. We are it. So by finding out what those books are, I create a classroom set of books for those particular needs. And that becomes something that we purchase with. When you book sale, we have an ongoing book sale. And I might mention we're in an old high school building, a 1928 high school building. And I have 13,500 square foot, which is the largest rural library in square footage in Oklahoma. It's a lot to clean. But it does give us some space. And we have a bookstore, an SOL, Wi-Fi bookstore, cafe that we have. And in that bookstore, we rotate books. And it's an on your honor, bring in books, take out books type of thing. They always bring me more than they take out. And what's wonderful is they bring in a lot of only read by a little lady on Sunday novels that are first-run novels. So a lot of the novels, the paperbacks, that kind of thing come through that book trade. I can't tell you the dollar amount, but the dollar amount run into several thousands of dollars each year that we don't have to spend because it comes through that book trade. Donations, we have many, many people who are very supportive of the library. When they get a new book, they know that say it's a Patterson, and we're all reading James Patterson. And I don't have that book. Then as soon as they read it, they bring it to us. And so we have that new Patterson book that's there. How about e-books? I know that's a question on the assessment. Do either of you provide access to e-books for your patrons? Yes, we do. We belong to the Oklahoma Virtual Library Consortium through a grant through our, I believe it was, state that allowed us to purchase into that. And I approached my city that if we did this, this was going to be an ongoing expense. And so the budget would have to be increased, but it's been very, very, very active here. Yes, and that's true with us too. I'm using the Kingfisher Special Tax Fund for our future purchases there, and it's overdrive in the Consortium. Another question, this one's from Margaret Woodruff. Margaret, if you're still on and you want to specify any other initiatives, the question is, how do you see this initiative working with other digital literacy initiatives available? So there are other projects out there happening too. DigitalLearn.org is one that comes to mind for me. Are any of those other digital literacy projects on your radar at this time? Mary, Leanne, any others on your radar right now? Not on mine right now because I'm trying to get all this smoothed out as smoothly as possible. I've got people that come in and I work with them to set up their e-readers and things like that. So we're sticking with this until we've got this running as smoothly as possible. Margaret, if you have specific initiatives you want me to ask about, please feel free to let us know in the chat. And then one more question with such limited budgets, do you do much resource sharing with other libraries in your area, like Interlibrary Loan or other sorts of resource sharing? Leanne, do you want to take that one first? Yes, we do quite a bit of Interlibrary Loan. In fact, we have a local author that lives in another small town around us that does quite a bit. I've Interlibrary Loaned for several college students and for a few people working on a postgraduate degree. We also share large print with the Watanga Public Library which has been very helpful to us. And so in the summertime we share performers for summer reading program, share ideas, all kinds of things that we do with other libraries around us. And I'm one of Mary's card holders. Okay, well we are nearing the end of our hour together today. I just want to thank both of you for taking the time to do this. I think it's great to hear the smaller library perspective and to know that Edge is worth it for smaller libraries. And especially I think once that peer comparison is there I think it will be useful. We do have contact information for both Leanne and Mary. And again, I'm sharing these slides so if you're wanting it and I'm going too fast you'll have access to the slides. And again remember, later today we're going to send out a follow-up email message and it will have a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and then any of the resources that were discussed or shared during today's session. We'll have another one of these sessions next month, another webinar focused on Edge. This one is talking about Staff Technology Skills which is Benchmark 8. And that comes up again and again as a topic of interest. And we're going to have a couple of librarians from Skokie Public Library in Illinois talking about their approach to overall staff technology skills within the library. So again, thank you so much Mary. Thank you Leanne. This has been great. And thank you all for your questions and for taking the time to be with us today. Have a great rest of the day and talk to you soon. Thank you.